This past week I came across a copy of a book called Icelandic: Grammar-Texts-Glossary by Stefán Einarsson. So far it seems quite thorough (although perhaps slightly outdated). Very interesting though.

Delodephius wrote:Nicholas Ostler: Empires of the Word - A Language History of the World

Have you started this one yet? Its on my Amazon shopping list. Planning to buy it soon.Let me know how you like it.

Well it's ok, not perfect. It's organized a bit strangely and chaotically. He for example placed Egyptian and Chinese in one section since they are both written in pictographic scripts and then tries to explain why one survived and one didn't.

He writes more about history than languages themselves, as the title says. I like it though since he wrote about languages not in so much a chronological order or according to language families, but according to the way they were used throughout history. For example: languages that spread by land and those by sea, those that spread as tools of religion and those as tools of an empire, those that were solely languages of literature and those that were languages of commoners, etc.

Currently I have returned to reading Zarathustra and the Transfiguration of the World by Paul de Breuil. It's a long book and it basically explains Zoroastrianism, its history beginning with Zarathustra, how Zoroastrianism influenced other world religions and how can knowledge of Zarathustra be applied to the modern world. Personally I think its one of the best books ever written.